Use a Harvest Tracker for Better Garden Planning

It might seem a bit over-the-top to document your garden and orchard harvest from year to year, but in reality, this practice can make your life as a gardener easier, less stressful and more productive.

Tracking your harvest (or plotting out "days to harvest" from seed packets and online research) can help you avoid problems and take advantage of opportunities during the growing season.

Assessment:

• If you were swamped in garden produce during the hottest part of August last year, maybe you’ll choose to plant earlier or later maturing cultivars this year to spread out the harvest and keep it more manageable.

  
  

• If you only have early season strawberries, maybe you’ll want plant another bed with a later ripening cultivar to extend the season.

  
  

• Or maybe you'd like to just harvest strawberries during a specific couple of weeks in early spring, but you'd like to try two different cultivars to see which one produces better or requires less care.

Trouble-shooting:

• If you should expect to harvest peaches in mid-June, but you rarely or never get fruit from your mature trees, it might be because a late frost kills the blossoms every year, so they never give you fruit. In the midst of other garden chores, you might not have realized the cause of your problem. Once you know, you can choose to add a later-blooming cultivar (or more likely two, for cross-pollination) to your orchard to avoid the problem.

  
  

• Maybe you notice that your broccoli was a complete bust last year due to cabbage moths. With that information recorded, you can plan to try transplanting earlier to avoid them, or note that you'll need to try floating row covers to keep them out.

  
  

Planning:

Once you identify your busiest harvest weeks, you can:

• rearrange your planting schedule to spread out the harvest

• plan a vacation or medical procedure to take place during the time when your garden isn’t producing

• Schedule your planting so that your harvest won’t come in during back-to-school week, the family reunion or the hottest part of summer

  
  

Expansion:

• If you only have June apples in your orchard, you might decide to plant some later ripening apple cultivars that are good for keeping over the winter.

• If you don’t grow anything that produces in June, and you’d like to be able to take advantage of the not-as-hot-as-July and August temperatures for canning, you might decide to plant blueberries or some other June-ripening fruit.

• Or, if you’ve got all you can handle with the strawberry harvest in May, you might decide against planting another May-ripening fruit that you had been contemplating.

  
  

Record Yields:

• If you record your crop yields, you can use that data to determine whether you need to plant more, less or the same next year.

  
  

• You can also compare one year to another and analyze whether unusual weather patterns or differences in your cultivation methods had a negative or positive effect on your yields.

All of this is valuable information that can help you to make better decisions when planning your garden. But only if you take the time to find it and record it for future use.

You can get our FREE printable Harvest Charts here: